Saturday, 28 March 2009

Requiem for the Network: Fifth Stage

The pictures above offer a wide-angle view on the location of the four panels of Requiem for the Network in the basement at the Akademie der Künste. This brief documentation gives some indication of how the curators have located the work precisely between the War Room on the ground floor, where the public can view the work by CCTV, and the corridor on the third level below ground. This attention to the positioning of the work expands the work’s presence, drawing attention to the way its design echoes organizational flowcharts, the complex weaves found in neural nets and the blast circles devised by RAND to plot the outcome of thermonuclear wars.

From top to the bottom: KH in the corridor standing next to the panels of Requiem for the Network (photograph taken by Lillevan), two oblique views of the panels’ arrangement on the wall, and the work itself as viewed on one of the War Room screens, relayed from the basement via CCTV - you can see the camera used for this live feed positioned just behind me at the end of corridor in the top picture.

About Me

Ken Hollings is a writer based in London. His work appears in a wide range of journals and publications, including The Wire, Sight and Sound, Strange Attractor, Frieze, Blast and Nude, and in the anthologies The Last Sex, Digital Delirium, Undercurrents, London Noir and Krautrock. His novel Destroy All Monsters was hailed by The Scotsman as ‘a mighty slab of trippy, cult, out-there fiction, mind-bending reading’. He has written and presented critically acclaimed programmes for BBC Radio 3, Radio 4, Resonance FM, NPS in Holland and ABC Australia. Ken is the author of Welcome to Mars: Fantasies of Science and the American Century 1947-1959, available from Strange Attractor Press in the UK and North Atlantic Books in the US. His new book 'The Bright Labyrinth' is now available from Strange Attractor Press.